Tommy Smith is a playwright. Early life Initially an actor in Seattle, WA, Smith played roles at the Intiman Theatre and Seattle Repertory Theatre. Smith began writing and adapting plays, winning the Artistic Pick at the 2001 Seattle Fringe Festival with the solo show of Joe Wenderoth's book Letters to Wendy’s. New York theatre Hired to come to New York to perform in Richard Foreman's King Cowboy Rufus Rules The Universe, Smith was accepted into the Juilliard School's Playwriting Program under Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang. Upon graduation, Smith was invited to The Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference to develop the play Air Conditioning. The next year, Smith teamed with director May Adrales at the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab to develop White Hot, a darkly comic psychological drama. White Hot premiered at HERE Arts Center and was published in The New York Theatre Review. The foreword by playwright Craig Lucas says: "[Tommy Smith] is writing in the shadow of our most daring and politically incendiary of martyred playwright saints, Sarah Kane and Edward Bond ... This is bleak terrain, a buried cesspool of self-loathing and unseemly, sadistic yearnings in love. The play can be read as a critique of the deadening fallout of our reactionary, materialistic, exploitative and soulless era. It can be read as a bad dream or a soap opera about the banality of evil. However you read it, it doesn’t go down easy." Adrales and Smith's next collaboration – the boundary-pushing identity drama The Wife – was hailed by The New York Times as “excellent … [the play] is a brew all Mr. Smith’s own, a sort of warped, contemporary La Ronde.” Los Angeles theatre Smith collaborated with director Chris Fields – the ousted founder of the Ojai Playwrights Festival – for three successful Los Angeles productions. Their 90s kitchen sink drama Firemen won five LADCC Awards, including Best Writing, and was named one of the year's best stage shows by The LA Times. The play also generated controversy for its treatment of a romance between a teenage boy and his school secretary. The following year, Smith and Fields received glowing reviews for Fugue, a violent choral play about the doomed love lives of classical composers Tchaikovsky, Gesualdo, and Schoenberg. Smith and Fields’ artistic relationship crumbled over contractual misunderstandings with their third and final production, the solo female prose play Ghost Light, whose single performance nonetheless generated